It was interesting the other day to trip across this brief essay in the ranking of the best graduate Theology programs in the United States. This wasn't just because both of my degrees are held to come from top-five programs, although that was pleasant to read. The task of ranking college programs is notoriously difficult, but I couldn't help but ( Read more... )

The temptation of "relevance," which today in academia, I'm afraid, is becoming more and more equivalent to "money making" and corporate ties, is addressed interestingly in this column from The New York Times by philosopher Justine E. H. Smith, particularly with regards to today's much-misunderstood discipline of philosophy. If the history of ( Read more... )

Just jotting down a couple of more-or-less random articles I noted today. A New York Times article on the sort of genetic history that we've seen exercises in over the last few year was of some interest, even if just more-or-less confirming what the historians already told us. That might give us some greater confidence in this sort of genetic ( Read more... )

G etting my feet back under me after a few days of yucky throat and achey back. I got my H1N1 shot last week, and it seems that half the time I get a flu shot, I seem to get flu-ey symptoms in the next week, in a mild way. The medical folks tell me that there's no causal connection of that sort, but there you go.

I remember toting around a ( Read more... )

Each semester that I teach Introduction To Theology, I begin with raising the question, "Is Theology Make-Believe?" (This is the English translation of the Irish form of the question as I have it in the title of this entry.) I do this for one simple reason: all of us have grown up in a culture defined philosophically by the movement called The ( Read more... )

An essay by Prof. Stanley Fish on the future of classic university education. By "classic" I mean the university education as a humane formation. What is generally called a university education today has in fact become something much less: it's a job training program. I don't think that that's snobbishness saying so. I don't think it's a ( Read more... )

My education in the Department of History at Northern Illinois saw me being trained by a large number of Marxist theorists. They weren't my primary professors, nor my best, but they were numerous. Professor Marvin Rosen, the Director of Undergraduate Education, was perhaps the most flamboyantly Marxist, and publicly despaired of my increasing ( Read more... )

Did many folks catch this? One of the refreshing pieces of babysitting the nieces is just the pleasure of sitting with a morning paper during part of breakfast (after the getting-the-girls-fed part). So this caught my eye in the Chicago Tribune yesterday, and its follow-up today ( Read more... )

itihasa drew my attention to a New York Times article with her blurb: A three-foot-tall tablet with 87 lines of Hebrew that scholars believe dates from the decades just before the birth of Jesus is causing a quiet stir in biblical and archaeological circles, especially because it may speak of a messiah who will rise from the dead after three days. The ( Read more... )

Did anyone pay any attention to the curious story about Pope Benedict XVI and the protests at Rome's Sapienza University this past week? I think that it might become one of those episodes that becomes larger in later history, as the significance of certain events gets taken as emblematic of historical shifts taking place at a given time. In this ( Read more... )